Yesterday I attended Andrea's funeral Mass with a few young friends. Andrea was eighteen. He fell asleep into eternity after spending his entire young life in a bed, beside his sister—like him, small and fragile, neither of them ever spoke a word.
They were surrounded by heroic parents: total devotion, love, work, exhaustion, tears, grief, rage, and rebellion. These were their only two children.
His parents had not expected it—Andrea's sudden departure. Their care, their vigilant attention day and night, their tireless effort (above all the mother's) to make sure nothing was ever missing for him, that everything existed for him—none of it was enough to hold him here. They had always hoped. And yet...
While we sang to Mary, "I thank you for this silence that remains between us, I bless the courage to live alone with him," I watched Nadia and Giulio's shoulders shaking with sobs. Did those words not belong fully to them as well?
A young man came to the altar to thank Andrea—whose life to many may have seemed without meaning—for offering the Lord "his five loaves and two fish"; everything he had. He invited us to ask Jesus to multiply Andrea's total gift again, to satisfy our hunger and give us strength to become, like him, givers of life.
The people listened, moved, and sensed that around this small family there was a mystery: the mystery of a love misunderstood, unrecognized by most. That love offered for us, in the likeness of God's own, to transform "our hearts of stone into hearts of flesh."
The fierce love his parents poured out so that Andrea's life would have meaning—it was not enough to keep him here on earth. Andrea, like so many of his brothers and sisters in the world, silently carried out the mysterious task entrusted to him: he laid down his precious life, lived in a way incomprehensible to most, as a young man of strength and courage.
May you, Andrea, and with you all the young people of the world forever bound in stillness, open the hearts and minds of those who still do not know—and do not want to know—the price of your presence among us.
May parents who read this, worn down and discouraged by the exhaustion of their tireless dedication, find strength and courage and hope again; may they above all never doubt how much we all need their irreplaceable five loaves and two fish.
- Mariangela Bertolini, 1995